Egburg/Egburga/Ecburg
Overview
Biography
Nothing is known about this woman except that she calls herself a disciple, that Boniface was her dead brother's friend, and that she is learned. As Eleanor Duckett comments: "Her letter is short, and her misery is very great; she manages, however, to bring in four reminiscences of Vergil's Aeneid, two of various writings of Aldhelm of Malmesbury ..., two of a letter written by Jerome to the monk Rufinus, together with at least half a dozen quotations from the Bible," Eleanor S. Duckett, Anglo-Saxon Saints and Scholars (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 361. Eckenstein conjectures that her remote settlement might be Repton and that she might be the daughter of Ealdwulf, king of the east Angles, abbess of Repton, see Lina Eckenstein, Woman under Monasticism (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963, first pub.1896), 109, 125.